From the snowy street,
Oranaan looked up at the smoking lab,
shivering in his shirtsleeves.
When the alarm went off,
he hadn't even had time
to grab a coat.

The huddle of other scientists
sent poisonous glares in his direction.

Well.
It wasn't as if
he'd done this on purpose.

Oranaan had been trying
to replicate individual effects
reported from anomalies,
in hopes of discovering
the underlying cause.
So far he had failed.

Not long ago, he had lost
his friend Rilaru to an anomaly,
so he was not giving up.

Maybe I should have used
blue time-crystals instead of red,
Oranaan mused to himself
as the fire-wagon finally arrived.

His supervisor also arrived
and began screaming at him
for not following safety protocols --

which was completely unfair,
because Oranaan had in fact
followed all the written rules.

It's just that he was studying
phenomena for which
appropriate safety precautions

had perhaps not been written yet.

Author's Notes

This poem was from the August 2013 Muse Fusion. It was inspired by a prompt from LiveJournal user Sibylle. This is the freebie for the session.

The poem is dedicated to the memory of Marie Curie, a groundbreaking researcher of radioactivity. She died of exposure to radiation because in the beginning nobody understood how dangerous it was or what precautions were necessary.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1903/marie-curie-bio.html
http://www.physics.purdue.edu/wip/herstory/curie.html